KEYSTONE PIPELINE DEBATE PRODUCES NO WINNERS

Environmental groups geared up for another week of fierce campaigning on the heels of U.S. Senate endorsement of the Keystone XL pipeline Friday. A largely symbolic gesture, the vote was just the latest play in a highly contentious debate over the pipeline, which aims to link Canadian oil sands production with U.S. and international markets.

In the energy world, the Keystone XL pipeline is but one of many infrastructure projects designed to move resources to market. Take away the name and countries involved and it could be virtually any major oil pipeline designed to connect distant production and demand centers.

But in the United States, and at the outset of President Barack Obama’s second term, the Keystone XL project has resurfaced as ground zero in the national debate over fossil fuels, the environment, and climate change.

Alas, with neither proponents nor opponents of the project willing to cede any ground, it seems increasingly evident that there will be no winners in this contest – at least in the short term.

Worse, as the issue has become increasingly impassioned, progress has slowed on all fronts.

The latest State Department environmental report pertaining to Keystone XL – released on March 1 – has arguably done nothing to temper the renewed angst swirling around the project; perhaps the opposite.

Indeed, U.S. government officials have been hesitant to make any definitive statements on the issue, with Assistant Secretary of State Kerri-Anne Jones quoted as saying it would be “premature” to interpret the report as an endorsement of the pipeline – or, implicitly, a rejection.

Environmental groups have ramped up their campaign against the pipeline and are using the report to renew calls for President Obama to reject the project and thus make good on his promise to address climate change.

Opponents from the environmental movement, including groups such as
350.org, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club, have argued that Keystone XL undermines U.S. efforts to tackle climate change. Indeed no one is disputing the fact that extracting and refining crude from the oil sands is a dirty process that results in higher CO2 emissions than average fossil fuel development.

Yet it is the central tenet of the opponents’ case – that blocking the pipeline construction will dramatically reduce the exploration and production of oil sands crude – which stands on less solid ground.

Many analysts and officials agree.

In an editorial, The Washington Post noted that while environmental issues, climate change, and consumption of fossil fuels are very real and serious problems, the Keystone XL campaign may not be the best avenue through which to address them; nor the most deserving of activists’ attention.

Robert Campbell of Reuters argued that the oil sands crude is likely to flow regardless of the outcome in Washington. Without Keystone XL, Canadian oil will find alternate pipelines or be shipped via rail. This view is supported by the State Department report, which concluded that the pipeline is “unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands.”